Overall and Final Verdict
Patriot wasn’t the first into the PCIe 4.0 market, even Kingston which is known for being a little slower and methodical already has their first PCIe 4.0 offerings out already. So it is about time that Patriot did the same. They went about it a different way than everyone else though. Most run similar Phison controllers if they don’t have their own design in house. Patriot went with the new Innogrit PCIe 4.0 DRAMless controller which I haven’t seen on any other drives. Their use of the Innogrit controller on past drives has worked out well for them in the past so I’m not too surprised by the choice. The Patriot P400 also keeps things simple on the styling front with a mostly blacked out look with the one white stripe and Patriot branding that isn’t going to look bad if the drive ends up visible. They also went with the thin graphene heatsink. I’m not 100% sold that these help much with the cooling, but they also don’t get in the way when installing them as well. It is thin and will fit under motherboard heatsinks which most motherboards that support PCIe 4.0 are going to have.
As for performance, Patriot advertises the P400 as a high-performance drive and simply by being a PCIe 4.0 drive, it reaches that goal. They did leave room in their packaging for a higher-end gaming focused drive and the P400 shows that as well. Being DRAMless the drive doesn’t top the charts, but it isn’t far behind with it sitting behind the FURY Renegade and the Crucial P4 Plus in most tests. It is basically the SSD version of the upper middle class. It’s fast, but there are faster. The P400 did especially well in the tests using smaller file sizes running right with the best in those situations and it was a little behind when those files went up in size.
There isn’t anything wrong with being a high performance drive but not being the HIGHEST performance drive. In fact, that is typically where you are going to find the sweet spot where performance is good but pricing isn’t going to break you as well. The Patriot P400 officially has an MSRP of $179.99 which would put it up with the FURY Renegade. But thankfully it is available at $135 on both Newegg and Amazon. I wouldn’t call it the best value even at that price, but it is priced nearly where it should be. For reference, the Crucial P5 Plus was similar in performance and is the same price right now. I think the P400 should be a hair lower than the P5 Plus, which is why I wouldn’t call it a value. The other area where I think the P400 could use some improvement is with its warranty. Most other drives in this range have a 5-year warranty and Patriot is only offering a 3 year with this drive. I also hope Patriot does follow up with a larger capacity version as well which the packaging and the drive itself do seem to indicate. But right now, the 512GB and 1TB options are all that are available.
Live Pricing: HERE
